Four suspects were temporary employees of Spherion Corp., a company hired by the Red Cross to staff a national call center in Bakersfield to field calls from hurricane victims.

The other five had ties to the workers and pretended to be victims by using special claim numbers to pick up checks at Western Union, authorities said.

"It is beyond the pale that there are those who would seek to capitalize on the tragedy wrought by Hurricane Katrina and the generosity of so many who donated relief funds," McGregor Scott, U.S. attorney in Sacramento, said in a statement Tuesday.

The wire-fraud charges lodged over the past week in U.S. District Court in Bakersfield follow allegations of similar hurricane-related schemes in Los Angeles, Houston, Atlanta and Miami. The suspects in those cases -- who are accused of defrauding the Red Cross and the Federal Emergency Management Agency -- are being prosecuted by the Hurricane Katrina Fraud Task Force, created by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

"We are prosecuting to the fullest extent of the law," Red Cross spokeswoman Devorah Goldburg said of the Bakersfield case Tuesday. "The bottom line is we take fraud seriously."

Kip Havel, spokesman for Spherion in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., said Tuesday that his company "finds it reprehensible that any person could have possibly taken advantage of this terrible disaster, and the company is assisting the authorities in their ongoing investigation."

All but Ray have been arrested. Most of the defendants are to appear today before U.S. Magistrate Dennis Beck in Fresno for a detention hearing.

Preslie is a convicted drug dealer -- paroled Aug. 20, just days before the hurricane -- and could not have been in Louisiana without permission, according to state Department of Corrections records and an affidavit by FBI Special Agent Ryan McDougal. Johnson, while working at the call center, helped create false accounts for Aminah Randle and Brown, both of whom he described as his girlfriends, McDougal wrote.

Aminah Randle had been scheduled to receive a fraudulent claim for $1,565, the amount that would be paid for a person claiming to represent a family of five, according to McDougal.

Brown and Tonjua Randle, who is a relative of Aminah Randle, also had been scheduled to receive $1,565 each, according to copies of checks attached to affidavits filed by McDougal.

Nobles told the FBI that Porter, a friend who worked at the call center, had given her a claim number and that Nobles had agreed to pay Porter $600 while keeping the remaining $965, authorities said.

"When I asked Nobles if she had ever lived in Louisiana, she said, 'Hell no,' " FBI Special Agent Anthony Sorensen wrote in an affidavit.

Sorensen then asked Nobles if she was entitled to the money, and she replied, "Hell no," the agent wrote.